I move off him and snatch up my phone from the floor. Claire again. I silence it once more, but this time I feel bad about it. She’s pretty persistent, and it has never been an emergency. Claire once called me four times in a row, and when I finally got out of the shower and called her back, she just wanted to tell me she had found her first split end. But I still feel bad. I don’t usually screen her calls.
“You should go,” I say.
We’re not touching anymore, but I can feel him next to me. Like the air between us is charged—that thick, unstable space right before magnets lock.
“My mom’ll be home any minute, and I really should return that,” I say, but I make no solid effort to stand. To get off the bed. It’s like there are two opposing forces inside me—one I’ve been fighting for a long, long time and one I just learned was there. I’m not sure which to listen to.
He gets up first. “Okay. Can I see you tomorrow?” “Yes.”
He leans down, touches my arm. “Other than at school.”
“I know what you mean.”
I watch him leave from the spot on my bed. I don’t get up to walk him to the door. I don’t move at all. When he’s closed it behind him, I lie back down. I curl up into a ball, on my side. I shut my eyes.
There it is again. Our beach house. The pool. Kristen on the rooftop. If I could empty my mind out, shake it onto the floor and let the memories fall like pennies from a piggy bank, I would. But I can’t. Instead I try to replace them. I think about Astor here, just a moment ago. About his lips on mine. His hands on my back. About his black eyes and cool palms and the weight of his gaze.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The next day I drag my feet to the Journal offices after school. It’s the same office that runs the school paper—a small computer lab on the second floor of our main building. The walls are covered in bulletin boards that have news clippings and short stories from the Journal that have won awards. I put most of those up there. Me and Trevor, anyway. I couldn’t possibly count how many hours we’ve spent in here over the last two years. There were plenty of nights Trevor and I would stay so late that we’d have to lock up the main school building. We’d order in greasy Chinese or Thai and work off side-by-side computers. Claire would stop by postdate and fill us in on whatever artist or billionaire’s son she was currently seeing.
Sometimes we’d do dramatic readings of particularly bad student submissions. The best was this one time Constance submitted a poem. It was under a pseudonym, but she printed it on her own letterhead—she must have forgotten when she turned it in. The poem was titled “Sunday,” and it was clearly about Tripp. She didn’t even bother to change his name much. The repeating line went like this:
Troy, you’re my best friend’s boy.
Trevor sang it like a really bad pop song, and I remember looking at him and thinking, God, I seriously love this kid.
“I don’t know,” Trevor said when he finished. “I think we should print it.”
“Funny,” I said.
“I’m serious. I think we’d be doing Troy a really big favor.” He smiled, leaned down over me. I was sitting in a swivel chair, my feet tucked up, turning side to side. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and stopped me from moving. Then he leaned down and kissed me.
Kissing Trevor was pretty epic. You know the moment in the movies when the music swells, right near the end? Kissing Trevor was like the end of a movie. Every single time.
“I bet Abigail wouldn’t even notice if we printed it with Constance’s name on it,” I said when he pulled back.
“Troy could also mean Trevor, you know.”
“Do you wish you were Constance’s boy?” I asked, running my hands through his hair.
“Desperately,” he said, kissing me again. “The only reason I date you is to get close to her.”
“I figured.”
“She’s pretty hot,” he said.
“Yeah?” I asked, bringing my lips up to meet his.
“Mhm,” he whispered. “She’s cute. And sexy. And she’s got these little freckles right below her ear.” He lifted my hair then, and kissed me on the neck.
“Constance doesn’t have freckles,” I corrected. “She spray tans.”
Trevor slapped the back of his hand against his forehead. “That’s right. I must have been thinking about you.” He brought his lips so they hovered right above mine. “Funny how that always seems to happen.”
“You’re going to the Journal?” Claire says. She called as I climbed the stairs, and I picked up, despite the fact that I’m already late. I still feel bad about silencing her yesterday and then not calling her back.
“Yes,” I say. I can tell she’s smiling. Claire is pretty easy to read, if you want to know the truth. “Just trying to make you happy,” I say.
Claire scoffs. “I never told you to go back to the Journal.”
“You’ve been pushing me out of pajamas all summer,” I say. “Turns out you have to get dressed for this activity, so I thought you’d approve.”
“True,” she says. “You know what? I will take full responsibility for your emotional progress.”
Emotional progress. I open my mouth to tell Claire about Astor, but something stops me. I don’t know why. She’d be thrilled, I think. She was the one who pushed me toward him in the first place.
“Shocking,” I say. “But I gotta go.”
“You’re so busy lately,” she says. “I never see you.”
“So come uptown.”
“You know I don’t go above Fourteenth Street anymore,” she says. Going above Fourteenth Street isn’t actually hard to do, but since Claire moved downtown, she’s really embraced the lifestyle. There is silence on the other end of the phone for a moment. “Have you seen Kristen?” she asks.
It makes me stop on the steps. “She goes here,” I say.
“Right,” she says. “Yeah. I was just wondering how she was doing.”
“She’s fine,” I say. The words have to fight through my teeth. I picture Kristen in class, her tiny frame, small voice. And she is fine, right? She’s fine. My stomach just keeps tightening. My brain immediately starts the familiar tirade:
You were wrong. You were weak. You ruined someone’s life just so you wouldn’t have to fess up to what a failure you have become. What a phony.
I hear Claire exhale. “Okay,” she says. “I miss you. Don’t forget who was here first.”
We hang up before I can tell her what I want to—that she was here first until she left, which isn’t my fault. I open the Journal office door to find everyone already there, sitting in a small circle. Mrs. Lancaster, Whitney Davon—a Columbia professor—and Trevor. He smiles when he sees me, and I can tell it’s one of relief. I showed. He’s got his Kensington blazer off again, and one of his cotton T-shirts stretches against his chest. I feel my face heat up. I look away. Try to shake the cold voice from my head.
“Good of you to join us, Mcalister.” Mrs. Lancaster makes a point of tapping her watch.
I don’t say anything, just nod. “Please take a seat,” she says, motioning to an empty chair. It’s the one closest to the door, thank God.
As soon as I’m seated, Trevor jumps in. “Caggie and I have a lot of great ideas for this year.”
Mrs. Lancaster eyes Trevor with wide fascination. So does Whitney. Whitney is pretty, probably late twenties. I forgot the effect Trevor has on girls, women, people of all ages, really.
When we were together I stopped noticing. I knew he was in it with me, so what did it matter? I didn’t have to worry.
“We really think this year is the one to take things to the next level,” Trevor says. His eyes are hopeful, bright. They look right at me.
“Mcalister, why don’t you elaborate?” Mrs. Lancaster sets her notebook down on a stray desk.
I know we had ideas, lots of them. We wanted to have a “first lines” competition among the students. We had a list of writers who were willing to contribute pieces. We wanted to do
reverse interviews where novelists interviewed students, instead of the other way around. I came up with that. When I think about that now, sitting here in this lopsided circle, it feels like it was someone else. How could I have cared about any of this? How did it ever seem important?
We had a lot of plans. But I had a lot of plans about a lot of things. Those didn’t work out too well, and sitting in this room, I know I can’t work with Trevor. The thought of us collaborating on something, anything, feels fake. Like I’d be pretending things are the same, when they’re not. I shrug. “I don’t remember, really. Maybe Trevor does.” I can feel Trevor gaping at me, but I don’t look at him. I just cross my arms and stare out the window. It’s eye level with the sky. All I see are buildings.
Mrs. Lancaster clears her throat. “Trevor, do you have something to add?”
I can feel Trevor’s gaze on me, the questions in his eyes. Let him wonder. That’s all I did this summer: wonder. Wonder where he was, what he was doing. Why he left. And then all of a sudden I can’t take being here anymore. I need to get out.
“Big test tomorrow,” I lie. “I’ll work on some stuff for Monday.” I know I won’t. I won’t come back. Even the Journal, the thing that was supposed to make senior year, the thing that I was most excited about, can’t provoke a reaction. There is no going back. Not to Trevor, not to the things I cared about before. Not to anything.
I leave and call Astor from the hallway. “Hey,” he says when he picks up. “I was hoping it would be you.”
“Are you free?”
“Are you kidding?”
I feel that familiar fluttering in my chest. “You weren’t at school.”
I hear Astor laugh. “My day’s just getting started.”
“Do you want to come over?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be home in fifteen.” I hang up and glance back at the door to the
Journal room. I imagine Trevor looking at my empty chair. Whitney’s eye on him. I picture him making some excuse for me, for why I left in such a hurry. I don’t feel bad that he’s getting a turn to lie.
CHAPTER NINE
The strange thing about missing someone is that sometimes it pushes you in the opposite direction, straight away from them. After the day at the Journal, Trevor and I barely speak, and Astor and I start seeing each other all the time. Every free moment. We spend lunches together at Kensington—lying out on the grass in the park, sitting on the benches on Fifth, even pushing our chairs together in the corner of the library, skipping class and hiding out. I get college applications in the mail and I stuff them in a drawer. How can I possibly choose a future when I am so focused on getting through the present?
I tell Claire about Astor the day after the Journal. “This is excellent news,” she says. “Now maybe you’ll stop hibernating.”
But the opposite turns out to be true. Summer turns to fall in New York, but for Astor and me it may as well be winter.
I see Claire less. I stop studying. I don’t seem to care about anything but being with him. I dream about how it feels to be close to him. How it makes the rest of my life delete down to nothing.
Even Hayley lessens. The pain is dissolving, just a little. When I’m with Astor, it’s harder to remember.
And he doesn’t make me. He just tells me he understands, and if I don’t want to talk about it, that is okay. He doesn’t try to hold me the way Trevor used to. He doesn’t tell me that I could say anything to him and he’d still be there. It’s okay if I say nothing.
“Do you ever think about dying?” Astor asks me a month later. October is creeping in on tiptoes. We’re supposed to be studying in my room, but I haven’t cracked the pages of a single book yet. We’re lying on the floor, my head resting on his stomach. It rises and falls with an irregular beat, like jazz music, every time he talks.
I pick up his arm where it stretches next to me and hug it to my chest. “Not right now,” I say. “Why?”
He shrugs. My head rocks on his stomach. “Sometimes I think about it.”
I sit up and look at him. “I try not to.”
He sighs and sits up, too. “Don’t you ever wonder what happened to them?”
“Them?”
He shakes his head. “Hayley.”
I inhale. My head feels light. “She died,” I say. “That’s what happened to her.”
“But where did she go?”
I make a move to stand. “Why are you asking me this?” The past has invaded our little bubble. I can almost hear it pop.
He reaches for my hand. “Are you pissed at me?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to ruminate on death. It’s not romantic.”
“Hey.” He gathers me up into his lap. I let him. “That’s not at all what I mean. I was just curious.”
I look into his eyes. They make me want to fall inside, find another world there.
“I’m curious about things too,” I say softly.
Astor doesn’t talk about his past. It’s like an unspoken rule we have: Don’t ask, don’t tell. But I know something happened. I can feel it. Something besides getting kicked out of school. Something bigger. Opaque. He’s never said what it is, and I haven’t pushed. After all, I know what that’s like, and how much I hate it. To be totally honest, I’m not so sure I want to know.
I get these hints of things, like echoes that have lost the word they once were. That have become just sound. When he talks, I know there is something behind what he’s saying. But he never expands on it. And I haven’t figured it out on my own, either. I haven’t been to his house; I haven’t met his parents. I haven’t wanted to. I think maybe this is better. Maybe this is how it should be. I knew everything about Trevor, and look where that got me. Astor and I get the opportunity to start over. With him I can be anyone.
“Come on,” he says. He slides a firm, flattened palm down my back. “I’m sorry I brought it up. Really.”
The moment takes over, the way it always does, and in the next instant the past is so far away.
Things escalate quickly. This has been happening a lot lately. We end up on my bed. His hands slip under my shirt and start exploring. He runs his thumb down my side, kisses my collarbone. Trevor and I had sex after our winter formal last year.
December fifteenth. It’s weird to remember a date like that, like an anniversary or something, even though we aren’t still together. I initiated it. We had talked about it a lot. Whether we were ready. How we wanted our first time to be together.
That kind of thing. Trevor wasn’t pushy. If we were kissing or something, he’d always slow things down. He said it was my decision to make, mine alone. What he didn’t understand was that I wanted to. I had wanted to from the first few months we’d started dating. But everything was so complicated with Trevor. There was so much involved there, so much that sex meant to both of us. Everything had so much more weight back then—what we thought sex stood for to us, to our relationship. It was indulgent. Naïve. It was so stupid to think that things like that mattered. That they made any impact on my life at all.
Trevor brought me to the Waldorf Astoria. I pretended I was mad at him for spending so much money, but secretly I was thrilled. I knew he had been saving up his tutoring money for weeks for this—months, probably. We were quiet in the elevator up to the fifteenth floor, but when the doors opened, he scooped me up. He carried me all the way down the hallway. When we got to the room he tried to take the key out of his pocket, but couldn’t with me in his arms.
“Can you get that?” he asked me.
I pulled it out and he angled me toward the door. The green light flickered and I opened it.
He was still carrying me when I saw the rose petals lining the way from the door to the bed. There were candles lit too, and a bottle of sparkling apple cider on ice.
“I wanted it to be special,” he whispered.
I’m really embarrassed to admit this, but I teared up. I buried my head in his chest and he wrapped his arms tighter aro
und me. He didn’t move, didn’t put me down; he just held me. Then he placed me on the bed. I remember thinking it was strange. We’d been alone together so many times— hundreds—but everything felt so new, so foreign, like we were strangers.
Until he started kissing me. There were no two ways around it. Kissing Trevor was just . . . home.
“I can’t,” I breathe. Astor keeps kissing me until I reach up and gently push his shoulders away.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. His voice is hoarse.
I sit back and shake my head. “I don’t know, I just can’t.”
The truth is that sleeping with him scares me. Not the actual sex, I don’t think. Trevor and I only did it a handful of times more after December fifteenth, so I’m not an expert or anything, but I do know what to expect. It’s more that being with Astor feels unknown. Intense. Like it might make me feel too much.
“Let’s go out,” I say.
Astor slides himself up onto one elbow. “Where?”
“We could go downtown and meet Claire.”
He runs his outstretched palm over my comforter, traces a stitched flower there. “I don’t think she likes me very much,” he says.
“That’s ridiculous!” I say it a little too loudly. “You guys have never even hung out before.”
“But I keep you away from her.”
Okay, so I haven’t been around as much the last month, but Claire has disappeared for guys plenty of times. She got defensive about it last week. She tried to tell me she didn’t think I was being “myself.” That I had “dropped off.” What she doesn’t understand is that for the first time in eight months I actually feel like I’m surviving. That I’m not lying on the floor broken into a million pieces. I think she’s just annoyed she wasn’t the one to put me back together.
“Come on,” I say, tugging him off the bed. “I’ll call her.”
“Is it really you?” she says when she picks up. I can hear the sarcasm in her voice, and for a moment it makes me angry. She’s so obvious—she can’t even pretend to be happy for me. Why should I feel bad for spending time with Astor? I’ve never given her grief about any of the guys she’s been with.
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